Friday, September 23, 2016

In today’s job market, attracting and keeping quality
employees is paramount. I belong to a couple of dairy groups on Facebook and
one of the most talked about topics is finding and retaining a workforce.
Yesterday as I went to get a quick lunch, I happened to notice the abundance of
help wanted signs in almost every business in town. So how can we compete? What
do we need to do as baby boomers retire and millennials enter the job market?

I wish I had the answer for you, unfortunately I think it
may require a combination of a lot of factors. One thing Cooperative Resources
International (CRI) is committed to is an extensive employee enrichment and
training initiative.

I worked in a career for 13 years where my bosses threw
professional development at us because it was required. I think if you would
have asked them, they would have told you they were doing a great job with
employee enrichment and training, therefore we were all engaged in our careers.
They would have been wrong.

A quality employee
enrichment and training program needs to be ongoing.

My old job put a big, fat check mark next to the ongoing
thing. In fact, many times I felt like I was in a professional development workshop
more than I was at my desk working. But don’t fall into the “been there, done
that” mentality either. Just because you offered your employees a couple of
training opportunities doesn’t mean you have a free pass to stop with the
enrichment.

CRI began a program called REACH in 2011. REACH is a series
of professional development

courses and projects to expand employees’ knowledge
of the cooperative, its subsidiaries and the industry we serve, provide
networking opportunities, and develop leadership and problem solving skills. To
date, 385 employees have taken advantage of one or more of the levels of REACH.

A quality employee
enrichment and training program needs to be employee driven.

When was the last time you asked your employees what they
enjoy most about their job? Have you asked them if there are aspects of the
farm or company they would like to learn more about? Would they like to try to
take on a new responsibility? If you allow employees the opportunity to provide
feedback about their job, they will become more engaged, as they are now in the
driver’s seat. Now, I realize someone is still needed to do the dirty, mundane
and often unsatisfying tasks, but if allowed to dream a little, those other
jobs don’t seem so bad.

While the REACH curriculum is maintained by CRI management,
it is constantly being updated based on past participant feedback. Projects
that are extensively researched by REACH students come from employee and management
identified opportunities and issues within the company.

Once an employee has completed some REACH training, he or
she is also eligible for the new CRI Global Enrichment Program. The win-win nature
of this program allows CRI employees to share their specific skill sets with
those in our industry across the world on a specific international project. The
employee then comes back to the U.S. with new enthusiasm and knowledge to help
CRI and our members and customers prosper.

In addition to REACH and Global Enrichment, CRI employees
are encouraged to look for other job-specific professional development
opportunities. Many find professional organizations to join to again help with
networking in the industry, as well as to learn new ways to accomplish their
jobs.

Having a well-trained, engaged workforce doesn’t just
happen; it takes work. CRI recognizes the importance of great employees and is committed
to their professional growth so they can continue to deliver excellence,
innovation and value to you, our members and customers.

So, what do you do to find and keep employees? Does your
employer do an especially good job with making you feel valued through training
and opportunities? We would love to hear about it in the comments section below!

Friday, September 16, 2016

For most beef producers, high on the fall to-do list is
pregnancy checking the herd (and crossing your fingers most, if not all, are
pregnant). It’s an important herd management step because, as we all know,
culling the open females can lead to significant savings at the feed pile – and
I think everyone can agree we want our operations to be as profitable and
cost-effective as possible. Along with pregnancy detection, there is another
important observation you should make while the pregnant female is in the chute
– body condition score (BCS).

Feeding a female into a higher BCS at calving is a losing
proposition, limited by the cow’s ability to consume enough to overcome her
energy deficit and the size of your feed bill. That is why body condition
scoring at pregnancy check is such an important tool. At pregnancy check cows
are in mid-gestation, which is one of their lowest maintenance energy
requirement times, therefore it is the most economical time to add body condition.
(It’s a win-win for everyone.)

The quandary of waiting until calving to observe body
condition is that a female in her early post-partum period is experiencing some
of the highest maintenance energy requirements of her life (you’d have
ridiculously low energy too if you were providing nutrients to another growing
being)! This is especially true for 2-year-olds who not only work hard to
produce milk to raise their calf but are still growing themselves.

Research tells us body condition score at calving has one of
the greatest impacts on rebreeding performance. For a cow to maintain a 365-day
calving interval, she must be rebred by 82 days post-calving. Cows that calve
at a BCS 3 or 4, on average, exhibit first estrus at approximately 80 days
post-calving, making it very difficult to maintain a one-year calving interval.
On the other hand, females that calve at a BCS 5 or 6 average 55 days to first
heat post-calving.1 That’s a 25-day difference, and we all know time
is money!

At pregnancy check you want the majority of cows in BCS 5 or
6 for optimal reproductive performance.

Once you have BCS score information, it is important to use
it. If pasture or pen space is available, it is a good idea to group cattle by
body condition. (A little organization goes a long way and will save you future
headaches.) You can then manage thin females to gain condition and manage other
females to maintain body condition in the most efficient manner possible.

The importance of body condition score and its role in the
rebreeding efficiency of your herd should not be overlooked. After all, the
success of your next breeding season is largely determined before this year’s
calf crop hits the ground!

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Day in and day
out, you grab your tweezers, open the tank, pluck out an A.I. semen straw and place
it in the water bath (or wrap it in a paper towel and put it in your pocket).
But, did you ever think what it took to get that A.I. straw to your tank? As Glen
Gilbert, Genex Vice President of Production, explains, it all starts in the
factory …

A bull
basically has a sperm factory that never takes a break. It constantly produces sperm
24 hours a day, seven days a week. It does not take time off for holidays or
bad weather, although weather can impact how the factory performs. A
bull’s health, his body condition, nutritional status, age and his environment can impact the factory too.

The Semen Assembly Line

The
“assembly line” production process takes about 10 weeks to produce a sperm
capable of fertilizing an egg. It’s a complex process in which cells divide to
reduce their chromosomes (amount of DNA) by half, dramatically change their
shape and grow a tail capable of motion. Any imperfection in the process, such
as breaks in the strands of DNA, results in a defective sperm that won’t be
fertile.﻿﻿﻿

Semen production is a
10-week "assembly line" process.

﻿

A Climate Controlled Factory

The
thermostat in the factory is set to maintain the temperature at 4 degrees below
body temperature. If the factory runs hotter, the sperm is defective. To help
ensure quality sperm, males are equipped with a sophisticated “air conditioner”
that works to maintain the proper temperature. Features of that air conditioner
include a large number of sweat glands along the surface of the bull’s scrotum,
the ability to raise or lower the factory depending on the outside temperature
and a system where warm arteriole blood coming from the body is cooled at the
top of the scrotum by cooler blood returning from the testis. In over-conditioned
bulls, fat deposits in the top of the scrotum interfere with this cooling mechanism
and result in a factory that is too warm.

Of
course, things such as hot summer temperatures or illness with fever can
overwhelm the factory’s cooling capacity and result in defective sperm too.
Even brief heat blasts lasting only a few days can impair normal semen
production for several months. In other words, a bull with “good quality” semen
one day can have a change in quality the following day.﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿
﻿

The
sperm factory has a sophisticated "air conditioner" to maintain proper temps.

Sperm Quality Characteristics

Sperm
need to be able to swim, have an adequate energy supply, be able to move up
through the uterus into the oviduct, attach to the lining of the oviduct and
wait for a signal from the female that her ova will soon be passing by. Then,
the sperm needs to have enough energy to pull away from the lining of the
oviduct by becoming hyper-motile, possess the necessary membrane structure that
can attach to the ova and have the enzymes necessary to digest its way through
the covering of the egg. Finally, the sperm needs to have the right complement of
DNA that will combine with the ova’s DNA to create an embryo. Once inside, its
DNA must be fully functional and not have any lethal genetic defects.﻿﻿﻿
﻿

For
effective cattle artificial insemination,
sperm need to be able to swim.

Every
bull will produce some sperm that have flaws. Some sperm can’t swim. Some don’t
have adequate energy stored. Some have faulty membranes, and some don’t have properly
packaged DNA. Any one of these flaws causes that individual sperm to be
useless. However, as long as enough of the entire population has the necessary
traits, a bull’s semen will be fertile when deposited at the right time and the
right place in a female’s reproductive tract.

Collectively
these necessary physical characteristics of a population of sperm are referred
to as “semen quality.” Each collection arriving in a Genex laboratory is
screened to ensure it has sufficient numbers of sperm with those quality characteristics.
If an ejaculate does not have adequate quality, it ends up outside in the
dumpster.

Production Protocols

Collections
that pass the initial screening tests proceed to the next steps - adding
preservation media and freezing. Following the protocols precisely for
preservation and freezing is important in order to yield an adequate number of
normal sperm per straw after freezing and because each part
of the process (preservation media, how its added, ratio of semen to extension
media, rate of temp change, etc.) can influence others.

Quality Control Commitment

From
the time a bull leaves his stall to go to the collection arena until his semen
comes out of the freezer no less than 56 distinct steps are carefully carried out
and monitored. Throughout the process, Genex production staff work by the motto,
“If there’s any doubt, throw it out.”

﻿﻿

At
Genex, sperm quality is checked again and again.
Staff follow a "if there's any doubt, throw it out" motto.

That
motto and the laboratory staff’s work doesn’t end when the semen is frozen in
liquid nitrogen. Instead, straws from each batch are thawed and again inspected
in the laboratory to ensure an adequate number of quality sperm survived the
freezing process.﻿﻿﻿﻿

﻿﻿

The batches that
are deemed “good quality” are sent off to Genex reps around the country who
deliver the semen straws to your farm. So tomorrow, while that A.I. semen straw is thawing
in warm water for at least 40 seconds (or in your pocket for 2-3 minutes),
think about what it took to get that straw to your tank.